Monthly Archives: August 2026

Realignment, and it’ll feel so good

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Do you really think they feed Christians to the lions here?

Having a look at the standings Monday morning should have been enlightening and enraging at once. Nine American League teams with losing records showed as still eligible in the postseason hunt, thanks to the execrable wild card structure. Likewise, one .500 National League team and two sub-.500 NL clubs showed still eligible.

That’s eleven out of thirty major league teams without winning records who can still call themselves contenders in this season’s pennant races. Four teams short of half. Do you really need me to tell you what’s drastically wrong with that picture? Do you really believe there’s nothing wrong with that picture?

Turn youself away from the continuing and (for some perverted contingencies) comforting howl of Damn Dodger bashing and ponder: With today’s wild card structure is it really any wonder there are a few too many teams who can think to themselves, and all but get away with it, that they bloody well don’t have to invest seriously in their major league product or their player development systems?

None dare call it by name. But teams not called the Mets don’t have to channel their inner 2011-2013 Astros and say it outright, either. You’d have to be sound asleep or somewhat naïve to believe tanking hasn’t receded or become extinct. They’re just not being as flagrant as those Astros happened to be about it. And, unlike those Astros, they’re not even pretending to promise great results down the proverbial road.

In 2022, Joe Sheehan wrote, “We should retire the term ‘tanking’ in baseball. It was an issue specific to the 2012-16 period when a bad [collective bargaining agreement] had too many incentives for losing. Now, teams not trying to win aren’t doing it for draft position, they’re doing it because it’s easy profit.” That’s not tanking? I have a DeSoto dealership to sell you cheap.

The owners now demand salary caps more than ever. (You’ve heard it before: stop us before we overspend/mis-spend/mal-spend again!) Practically everyone else outside Los Angeles thinks it’s all aimed at bringing the Damn Dodgers back into line, and they think that’s a bloody good thing. They think it’s nothing more than spending that keeps the Damn Dodgers ahead of the rest of the pack. They may also think Dodger Stadium is where they feed Christians to lions.

They pay little to no attention when Tarik Skubal—you remember him, the big enchilada of this past trade deadline, traded to the Dodgers for some prime enough prospects—came right out and said, “Every team could trade for me. Every team could make that acquisition.

And I don’t really sympathize with people that blame the Dodgers for anything they’ve done . . . They’ve developed a really good organization. They draft well, they acquire talent really well, they retain talent. It’s a winning organization. Now the complaints seem to be because they’ve won the last two World Series. I don’t think it was like that three years ago. So I don’t really sympathize with people that are complaining because the Dodgers do all the right things.

Boy, you can’t please anyone anymore, can you?

Once upon a time the wailing, gnashing, and crying was that we may never again see a repeat World Series champion. Oops. The Damn Dodgers just won back-to-back Series. The big rich guys also entered this season as the overwhelming favourites to pull off a three-peat unseen since the 1998-2000 Yankees.

Are you getting as tired as I am of pointing toward the Mets, who’ve actually out-spent the Dodgers this year, but who sat seventeen games out of first in the NL East Monday morning. (That’s thanks to their pre-August disasters. They’ve spent August going 12-8.) Assuming you read and paid attention to it in the first place, did you forget Ken Rosenthal’s assertion in The Athletic after the Skubal trade?

[H]ere’s something else the Dodgers exploit: the risk-averse nature of so many other clubs in today’s game . . . [T]he dirty little secret of a salary cap and floor system is that it would not guarantee small-market teams success. Many would need to develop more of a killer instinct, an instinct the Dodgers demonstrate time and again.

There’d be no guarantee of small-market team success in a twelve-team postseason picture with a shorter regular season, either. If there’s one thing the Lords of Baseball have proven time and again, it’s that they’ll find or create every loophole they can to continue demonstrating that, to them, the common good of baseball equals making money for themselves, if allowed.

The present postseason structure and season-long interleague play have already rendered the regular season something between a gag and a farce. (They’ve also left the All-Star Game an exercise in futility.) They’ve left genuine competitors to have to plow through those with no legitimate business in a championship round if we had a postseason that makes the regular season meaningful again.

We might have to begin the overhaul by overhauling the selection of baseball’s commissioner. The last commissioner who genuinely believed the good of the game was more and deeper than making money for it was putsched by the owner who squirmed, bumped, and muscled his way to the commissionership. The owner who hand-picked the current commissioner who has no vision for the game above and beyond the profits for his thirty employers.

Frankly, the commissioner should be elected by votes of two contingencies: the ownerships; and, the players through their team reps. The commissioner would be beholden not to one or the other faction but to both. (That’s kind of what Fay Vincent, flaws and all, hoped to accomplish before Coupmissioner Selig and company forced him to resign before they could execute him. How dare he.)

Now, about that realignment of both the leagues and the postseason picture. Simpler than you think. I’ve talked about it elsewhere. It’s worth discussing again.

Baseball is a franchise business. The company makes (or should make) certain rules for its franchisees, including the one that should have been heeded morally and ethically but just might need a legal boot in the backside to make stick: If you buy a ballclub and refuse to invest reasonably (and not just monetarily) in putting an honestly competitive product on the field, the company will force you to sell to an owner(ship) that will.

(You think I’m a madman with no regard for property rights? Ask what happens to the McDonalds or the Baskin-Robbins or the Jersey Mike’s franchiser who fails to build and perform reasonably.)

Having done that, we realign the leagues. Expand each by a single team each. Sixteen NL teams, sixteen AL teams, no more odd-numbered leagues. Then, we subdivide each league into conferences and divisions. An eastern and western conference in each league; an eastern and western division in each league of eight teams apiece.

Now comes the fun part: we dump the wild card system whole. Dead. Buried. Right next to regular-season interleague play, the gag whose shelf life expired before Pontiac did. (We also send Commissioner Milquetoast’s Manfred Man the way of the Checker Cab. I’m betting the Checker Cab would prove to be missed far more.)

In its place, we schedule each league with reasonable interconference play that does not equal or overwhelm intra-conference play. And the leagues don’t see each other except a) in the All-Star Game; and, b) in the World Series.

We also get to dump the postseason saturation we now endure. The current system means that, if each postseason series goes the complete distance, there’d be 53 postseason games. By the way, the Damn Dodgers bashers do know that last year’s Blue Jays got to within a hair’s breadth winning the World Series. Don’t they? (How dare that old fart Miguel Rojas spoil it with a top-of-the-ninth home run before throwing the lead Jays runner out in the bottom?)

With all the foregoing, yes, we can still have a 162-game regular season. (Earl Weaver, Hall of Fame manager: This ain’t football. We do this every day.) But now we have a League Championship Series, and while we’re at it we’ll return it to its original, pre-1985, best-of-five format. That restores the World Series to its proper position as baseball’s sole best-of-seven set.

The greatest sports show on earth. The one that stood skyscrapers above all the other sports who did their level best to make almost-everyone-gets-a-cookie postseasons legitimate championships.

And if you team doesn’t finish the regular season in the parking spot marked first place? Spring training’s only four months away. Time to get to remaking/remodeling work. 

Portions of this essay have been published previously.

Field of Gab

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Field of Dreams Pre-Game

The first group of Hall of Famers step through the corn and onto the field: L to R—Bert Blyleven (RHP), Joe Mauer (C), Paul Molitor (DH/3B), Andruw Jones (CF), Mike Schmidt (3B), Steve Carlton (LHP), Harold Baines (DH/OF).

Twenty-six Hall of Famers stepped through the corn to stroll down the field, all but two of whom wore the uniform of the team they represented on their Cooperstown plaques but two. Tony La Russa and Fred McGriff have blank hats on their plaque heads. McGriff wore a Braves jersey; La Russa wore the Hall of Fame jersey presented him upon his election.

Perhaps appropriately for the evening’s contest between the Phillies (declared the visiting team, wearing throwback-to-the-1930s road uniforms) and the Twins (declared the home team, wearing their new-to-Minnesota 1961 uniforms), two of those Hall of Famers played for each team during their careers: lefthanded pitcher Jim Kaat and first baseman/designated hitter Jim Thome.

The pregame tribute to those twenty-six at Thursday’s Field of Dreams Game (and, yes, we noticed Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven circling around his head when he sensed a camera closeup was upon him) was moving. So was Barry Bonds’s pregame commentary that he wished his late baseball playing/coaching father, Bobby, could walk through the corn for a catch. You might lose count of those in the dugouts, on the field, in the stands, who share the same wish.

The Netflix broadcast of the game itself, however, was . . . well, take your pick. Annoying? Cringe? Distracting? Almost interfering with plays on the field? All the above?

You get that the Field of Dreams Game isn’t your ordinary regular season game. Like the storyline of the film for which it’s named (and on whose lands it’s played), it has soul-deep connotations for players, managers, fans alike above and beyond the game’s natural such connotations. But there’s a right and wrong way to do it.

Bert Blyleven

You guessed it: Blyleven couldn’t resist circling when the camera panned him up front and close.

Matt Vasgersian did a very credible play-by-play. Hall of Fame pitcher CC Sabathia and longtime popular outfielder Hunter Pence showed their promise as broadcast analysts. But they forgot often enough about the value of silence, of letting the play speak for itself. And, at least twice, the in-game player interviews got in the way of those players having to try, you know, making plays.

Philadelphia’s Kyle Schwarber did Kyle Schwarber stuff right out of the chute, when he opened the game hitting the third pitch from Minnesota’s Taj Bradley against the wind blowing in and into the right field corn. The Phillies scored another in the inning when Bryson Stott—with the Twins pulling the infield in with first and third (Bryce Harper, walk; Luis Arraez, base hit)—hit a high liner into the gap in left center field to score Harper.

Kyle Schwarber

The Schwarbinator did Schwarbinator stuff Thursday evening, of course, starting with this corn crunch in the top of the first . . .

But in the bottom of the second, the Netflix team had Phillies left fielder Brandon Marsh on the hookup to chit-chat with one out and Twins right fielder Luke Keaschall at the plate. Yakety-yak, chitter-chat—oops! Gotta bounce, guys.

Marsh had to zip it on a dime to run back to the fence in front of the left field corn, where Keaschall’s loft cleared it by a hair, or at least a small husk, cutting the Phillie lead to 2-1. You couldn’t help wondering if Marsh might have leaped and yanked it back for a home run theft if he hadn’t been blabbering with the boys in the loft.

Brandon Marsh

Circle shows the ball falling just behind the corn fence. Marsh might have had it with a well-timed leap if he hadn’t been engaged in chitchat by the Netflix broadcast crew during the inning.

Opening the fourth, Marsh began atonement by walking on a full count. Then, he hit the jets for second. He looked like a dead pigeon at first. The Phillies challenged. A television replay showed him using a clever swimmer-like move to elude the tag and hit the pad safely. No surprise: the Phillies won the challenge.

After Marsh took third on a Justin Crawford infield out, the Schwarbinator did another Schwarbinator thing, hitting another long ball to right onto which Keaschall actually got his glove long enough for the ball to glance off the end and into the corn. Then Trea Turner doubled, Harper sent him home with a base hit right through diving Twins second baseman Kody Clemens, Arraez nailed an opposite-field single, but Stott flied out to left.

You guessed it: Clemens’s old man, longtime pitcher Roger, was up in the booth while sonny boy was on the line with the team. A little friendly father-and-son banter with and around the crew. Oops! Clemens had to cut it even shorter than Marsh, when Harper swung and shot the ball up the pipe. Thanks to Clemens’s live mike as he dove and landed right on top of it while the ball shot under him, it sounded rather like one of the heavy desert stones landing flat upon Wile E. Coyote after springing yet another defective Acme trap.

At least, whenever Fox Sports miked players and managers up during postseason games, they had the courtesy and the brains to keep those interviews to those in the dugout, not on the field. Say what you will about Hall of Fame broadcaster Joe Buck, but he never kept Johnny Damon on the line in center field at all, never mind long enough before Damon had to go gotta bounce to try robbing Derek Jeter of an extra base hit.

Marsh atoned further for his interview-disrupted non-homer theft when he squared up Twins reliever Travis Adams in the seventh and sent a two-run shot into the right field corn. That proved the last of the scoring, the Phillies winning 7-1. with Aaron Nola going five strong and four Phillies relievers keeping the Twins funeral service-quiet.

Well, Netflix’s people have time yet to continue working out the bugs. Their next baseball broadcast under their three-year deal won’t come until next Opening Day.

On TJ’s farewell and his Cooperstown case

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Tommy John

Tommy John, near the end of his White Sox tenure.

The symbolism was impossible to dismiss. A young Tigers pitcher named Jobe, making his first major league start since undergoing the surgery his namesake pioneered. On the same day that surgery’s namesake said farewell to baseball world as he entered into hospice care.

Jackson Jobe’s first start after the long road back from Tommy John surgery ended with five splendid shutout innings: two Giants baserunners (Drew Cavanaugh, third inning walk; Willy Adames, base hit in the fourth), four strikeouts, one hit, one walk. On a day the Tigers needed a big start following the trade deadline loss of Tarik Skubal, Jobe gave it.

The game ended in a shutout with two Tigers relievers keeping the Giants to a single hit the rest of the way of an 8-0 win. But on the day one Jobe kept the Giants quiet, the other Jobe’s Patient Zero (as Jay Jaffe once called him) issued a jarring public statement.

Tommy John has gone into hospice care. He was unable to make the Yankees’s Old Timers Day festivities Saturday because of health issues that have included a battle with bladder cancer. (Irony of sad ironies: the starting pitchers between the Yankees and the Braves Saturday—Gerrit Cole, Yankees; Chris Sale, Braves—were Tommy John surgery patients themselves.)

His formal statement was a simple and direct thank you to the Yankees, the Steinbrenner family, and pioneering orthopædic surgeon Dr. Frank Jobe:

Tommy John statement

Just how much time he has before he goes to the Elysian Fields is unknown. What is known is that John has a unique Hall of Fame case. It would be a grand gift from the Lord in whom he believes devoutly to delay his departure until the Classic Baseball Era Committee meets in December 2027.

The Classic committee considers those whose primary contributions occurred prior to 1980. Taken strictly as a pitcher, Tommy John’s career went eighteen seasons, including a) the year he missed rehabbing from his eponymous surgical procedure; and, b) 1980 itself. Considering that and that pioneer season, it would fall to the Classic committee’s purview.

Taken strictly as a pitcher, too, John doesn’t quite have a Hall of Fame case. Stop screaming and hear (well, read) me out. Here’s the elementary look at his career pre- and post-surgery.

What I said once still holds: that gaudy-looking 2.97 ERA before the surgery masks a modest peak value. He had all or parts of twelve seasons on his arm when he underwent the surgery; he had an unexpected and brief peak in the first five seasons following the operation.

Tommy John, Dr. Frank Jobe

Dr. Frank Jobe (right) with Patient Zero. “Let’s do it,” said TJ when Jobe proposed it.

TJ was no strikeout machine, as his pre- and post-surgery K/9 numbers indicate. He was a brainy sinkerballer (some said the true heir to the ancient crafty-lefty tradition) with a couple of, shall we say, other offerings in his repertoire. (More anon.) He depended more on the fielders behind him to get his outs, which you’d expect from a fellow with his repertoire.

His ERA (by a long enough shot) and his fielding-independent pitching (FIP, by not so long a shot), and his WHIP (likewise), were lower before the surgery. He struck fewer out per nine after but walked about the same on both sides of it. He had only one seasonal ERA under 2.00 in his career. (1968’s 1.98, during the Year of the Pitcher, when he tied with Gary Peters for the lowest FIP among the White Sox starting rotation at 2.83.) He had five sub-3.00 FIPs but achieved it only once after the surgery.

Wins above replacement (WAR) doesn’t particularly help him, either. TJ averaged 2.6 WAR per season before the surgery and 2.8 after it. He had three 5.0+ WAR seasons (considered All-Star level minimum) pre-surgery, one post-surgery, and was chosen for only one All-Star team among those (1968) while making three All-Star teams post-surgery only one season of which was 5.0+. He totaled 31.1 WAR pre-surgery and 31.0 after. The average Hall of Fame starting pitcher has 73.0 career WAR and 49.8 peak WAR. (John’s peak WAR: 34.6.)

By the way, John was a good-fielding pitcher with outstanding range factors at the position. (Sinkerballers have to be, but not all of them are.) All you’d have had to do was remove Jim Kaat and a couple of others, and John might have won six Gold Gloves or more.

What makes John a Hall of Famer, then, especially if he shakes out as the number 79 starting pitcher of all time? He fell twelve shy of the magic 300 pitching wins, but you might as well say a fellow as dependent as John was on his fielders fell twelve shy of 300 credits for everyone else’s work.

It’s longevity that makes TJ most similar (according to Baseball Reference) to ten consecutive Hall of Famers. In order: Kaat, Robin Roberts, Bert Blyleven, Ferguson Jenkins, Early Wynn, Tom Glavine, Burleigh Grimes, Tony Mullane, Don Sutton (more anon, too), and Eppa Rixey.

Tommy John was a good pitcher who was great now and then over 26 seasons. More to the point: he not only proved that there could be a baseball life at all for pitchers whose UCLs blew out, he pitched fourteen seasons of major league baseball after he underwent the surgery when nobody, including TJ himself, knew for certain how much more major league life he’d have on the mound.

(John has also been very vocal against the rising trends of Tommy John surgeries in kids between 15 and 19, indicators that they’re being pushed past their natural limits before their times. He has more skin in the game than you’d suspect, too: his son, Tommy III, is a chiropractor whose patients have included perhaps too many teen athletes.)

As a good and sometimes great pitcher plus a bona-fide pioneer, John belongs in the Hall of Fame. So does Jobe. That “recognition” given both Jobe and his first Tommy John surgery patient at the Hall in 2013 isn’t sufficient. (Jobe passed to the Elysian Fields a year later.) Pray the Lord keeps John among us long enough to get the Classic committee’s enshrinement as the pitcher/pioneer he was.

Even if you have to place a dirt- or grass-scuffed ball next to his plaque. Sorry, I’m going there once more: my favourite Tommy John story.

Tommy John

“Tommy John and Don Sutton. If anyone can find one smooth ball from that game, he ought to send it to Cooperstown.”

Thomas Boswell once described TJ as “the elegant Rhett Butler of outlaws. In the fine Whitey Ford tradition of mudballers and scuffballers, the gentlemanly John can turn a tiny scratch into a double-play grounder.” Orioles pitcher Mike Flanagan once cut three straight lines into the meat of a fresh ball, showed it to Boswell, declared “Any time I need four new pitches, I got ’em,” then said, “My God, Tommy John could make this ball sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’.”

John wasn’t a ball doctor himself so much as he used what was handed to him, namely a ball not yet thrown out of play at once after a ground or fly out or a base hit. Imagine the fun, then, when John as a Yankee was matched against ex-Dodgers teammate and fellow scuff-and-ready pitcher Don Sutton as an Angel, in Anaheim, in August 1987.

The Yankees won the game in eleven innings, 3-2. It’s what happened in the first few innings when the Yankees opened with a 1-0 lead that provided more than a little mirth. Mercurial (har har) Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, watching the game from his Tampa digs, called the Yankee dugout and began bawling manager Lou Piniella out. I demand Sutton’s immediate arrest, frisking, arraignment, trial, conviction, and execution!

“George,” Piniella replied, “do you know what the score is? If I get the umpires to check Sutton, don’t you know that the Angels are going to check TJ? They’ll both get kicked out. Whatever they’re doing, TJ is doing it better than Sutton. So let’s leave it alone.”

Neither John nor Sutton was awarded the pitching decision in the game. Each came out after surrendering two earned runs apiece. (John after six and a third innings; Sutton after seven.) The Yankees pushed what proved the winning run home in the eleventh on a ground out; the Angels threatened in the bottom, before Yankee closer Dave Righetti pitched out of his own self-inflated jam (he walked Wally Joyner to load the bases) by getting a game-ending pop out to the infield.

“Tommy John and Don Sutton,” said an unnamed scout in the press box. “If anyone can find one smooth ball from that game, he ought to send it to Cooperstown.”

Heart, stones, and Tarik Skubal

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Tarik Skubal

Tarik Skubal, now a Dodger. Stop screaming, start thinking.

Last Wednesday, Tarik Skubal took the mound for the Tigers, in Comerica Park, with just about the entire world deciding it was going to be his last such appearance before this year’s trade deadline. Is that the way you saw it, with no room for alternative views?

If so, then boy did the Tigers do everything in their power not to prove they wanted to keep him and try to re-sign him.

Skubal did his part. It only began with fighting back from the 2-0 hole to strike Orioles leadoff hitter Tyler Ward out to open the game. That made Skubal the second-fastest pitcher in major league history to reach a thousand strikeouts (he missed Hall of Famer Randy Johnson by one game) and the fastest in Tiger history to do it.

Then, he worked six and two thirds while his mates staked him to a 7-1 lead, scoring three in the third, two in the fifth, and two in the sixth. And what kind of appreciation did the Tiger bullpen show with a mission of protecting a six-run lead with a mere three and a third innings to go, theoretically?

The Orioles absolutely trashed the Tiger pen for two runs charged to Skubal’s jacket after he left the game and seven more to come before they came away with a twelve-inning, 10-9 triumph. The only surprise should have been Skubal not known to have demanded a ticket out of town post haste after that kind of depreciation.

Three days and nights later, Skubal was traded. No thanks for the memories, Tarik. And try not to knock those three delicious prospects—righthanded pitchers  River Ryan (if that doesn’t sound like a movie star’s name, I’m not sure what would) and Brady Smith; outfielder Zyhir Hope—on their asses when you pass them on the way to downtown Dodgerville.

“Here comes the anti-Dodger hysteria,” snarked The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal when the deal got done. “Here comes another round of small-market defeatism. Here comes the lockout, not that its occurrence was ever in doubt.” Defeatism? How about small-market self-immolation? How about small-market brain impairment?

The Tigers just couldn’t summon up the will or the ways to stay near the American League race fringes the rest of this season, never mind summoning up the will and the ways to think that maybe Skubal would be the anchor of a new generation of Tiger competitors. And before you all continue yapping money!money!money! and cap!cap!cap!, how about catching a breath and doing a little serious thinking for a change?

For one thing, serious thinking is embedded just as deeply in the Dodger DNA as reputedly bottomless financial resources. “Skubal to the Dodgers was not a fait accompli,” Rosenthal writes, “nor should it have been.”

Other contenders had big-time prospects to offer. Every team could afford the remaining $9.4 million on Skubal’s contract. How is it that the Dodgers again were the ones to step up? How is it they so often pull off these kinds of moves, even when money is not the deciding factor?

. . . The Dodgers aren’t just doing this with money, though their vast revenues sure help. They are the industry standard, or close to it, in scouting, developing, trading and every other aspect of a baseball operation. They also possess a singular quality that most other teams do not, a fearlessness that could help them become the first team to win three straight World Series since the 1998 to 2000 Yankees.

. . . They’ve exploited their ability to withhold from revenue sharing a healthy portion of their mammoth local TV deal, an arrangement that arose from a settlement in bankruptcy court between MLB and former owner Frank McCourt.

They’ve also exploited their signing of Shohei Ohtani, the greatest player of our generation, to an absurdly deferred $700 million deal that he offered to every club pursuing him in free agency, including his previous one, the Los Angeles Angels.

By the way, the Dodgers landing Skubal’s rental isn’t a guarantee that they’ll get the World Series three-peat they crave. Try to remember (as Rosenthal does) that the Dodgers got knocked off in two straight division series by the Padres and the Diamondbacks, and almost lost a third straight such set to the Padres again.

And, in case you’ve forgotten, winning their second straight Series last fall wasn’t exactly a lopsided demolition derby. The Blue Jays forced them to a seventh game, and it took fortune, surrealism, and survival for the Dodgers to win it at last.

The word around the game according to several known reports is that a number of teams including the National League Central-leading Brewers and the AL East-leading Rays weren’t shy about paying Skubal the rest of the season. So how did the Damn Dodgers—who have the resources as well as the attitudes to think about extending Skubal long and handsomely—end up with the trade season’s big prize?

The aforementioned fearlessness. Never mind the ancient Washington Senators in Damn Yankees singing you gotta have heart. (And stop paying more attention to whatever Lola wants, too.) You gotta have stones, too. The Dodgers have those in as much abundance as they have heart.

“[H]ere’s something else the Dodgers exploit: the risk-averse nature of so many other clubs in today’s game,” Rosenthal continues. ” . . . [T]he dirty little secret of a salary cap and floor system is that it would not guarantee small-market teams success. Many would need to develop more of a killer instinct, an instinct the Dodgers demonstrate time and again.”

They used to say that about the Damn Yankees, too. Around the turn of the century.